History Summarized: Ancient China

Hey Blue, thanks for the shout-out! :-)

It seems that there are still many gaps in our understanding of ancient Chinese history. Perhaps the archives are incomplete?

china's history is just "this dynasty sucks, we need to split up" then "being split up sucks we need to form another dynasty"

China: Forms a Dynasty Peasants: "HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TEACH YOU THIS LESSON OLD MAN!"

You pulled a Suibhne and are making us wait for part 2

"Machiavelli would be very proud." Damn it Blue you have to bring Italy into everything don't you.

Chinese person here. YES. THE VALIDATION IS REAL. I LIVE IN BLUE’S PLANE OF EXISTENCE.

I like how the history of China follows closely with Taoism, with cycles of order and chaos. Yin and yang.

Great video! It should also be noted that the Xiongnu/Hun link is a bit debated. But so is just about everything in ancient history.

So, China went from city states, to empire, to bigger, smaller states, to bigger empires, to states, to empire, to different empire, to other empire. Are we sure this isn’t just Greece?

Still think it's pretty cool how China's writing system became so uniform under Shi Huangdi. There were tons of different dialects of spoken Chinese but no matter where you went, the writing style was always the exact same so even if two people couldn't understand what the other one was saying, they'd be able to understand each other perfectly in writing.

My History Class composed of: (in no particular order) Overly Sarcastic Productions Kings and Generals Extra Credits Shadiversity

Fun fact about Sima Quan (don't know what you're calling him Blue, or why?) he had the choice about to get executed or castrated. He chose castration so that he could finish his Shiji (Also known as Records of a Grand Historian) which were originally written by his father, Sima Tan, who died before finishing. Sima Quans choice was an incredible dishonor, automatically making him a second class citizen, but the Shiji was so formative that it basically defines Chinese Historiography. I guess you could call him the Chinese Jesus. He sacrificed his dick, so that we could get great courtly intrigue stories 2000 years later (seriously read the Shiji, it's basically just game of thrones in China)

The Mesopotamian and Ancient Egypt had their records and scripts massively on clay and stone, while ancient China used mostly bamboo slips which could easily rot away before paper-making was improved, PLUS mid-Shang dynasty had a prosperous divination culture. This was probably one of the reasons that the oracle bone script and bronze inscription turned out to be the earliest record in Chinese history that was discovered. Those bone scripts were so sophisticated that one cannot stop believing that there had already been a long time of Chinese writing before 1600 BC.

"Yeah, my empire broke." "Have you tried turning off and on again?"

You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this

So when are we going to get the next exciting chapter of Tripataka Gets Kidnapped Again Due To The Incompetence Of Piggy ?

Honestly, you pronouncing it as ‘Shang’ instead of ‘Shaeng’ is better than 90% of people in America. You did good

Sinology student here: 天 tian1, although it literally translates to "sky" or "heaven", has little to do with what we in the west think about heaven. It's more like "the universe" or probably "the largest something", "the extreme". The Chinese character 天 shows a human 人 ren2 who reaches for the highest that there is: the heaven. Please don't confuse tian with God or heaven in our western tradition.

Everything went well until the Mongols attacked